Hong Kong Young Writers Anthologies Fiction 4567 | Page 353

The cuckoos’ laments came to my ears note by note. People were shouting in harsh tongues
everywhere, strange syllables jutting from their teeth like broken jades. The radio crackled with so
many half-garbled commands that I prayed someone would just blast it into fragments.
It was so close to New Year.
“We must go on,” she said to no one.
But who was left? I thought disorientedly. The dead were cast away on the streets like used
matches, their pale bodies ridden with starbursts of bullets.
The smoke wafting in through the window smelt of burned flesh and singed hair. It wrapped
around her, around us. Was the moon bloodied as well, and the stars in the sky? As red as the stains in a
rhododendron?
She clutched me tightly as I kissed her; wondering if tomorrow would leave smoldering embers in
place of familiar streets, wondering if there was world enough, and time.
*
Someone was already at the balcony. She was attempting to light a cigarette, but each of her
matches managed only a brief flare before the wind snuffed them away.
The city below flickered like a revolving lantern. My love was shawled by a smoke, it suffocated
her every breath –
I approached. “Need a light?”
The grey parted. She smiled and drew out another match from her purse. This time, it went
ablaze.
*
The next morning, she had done her hair again into their rakish, resolute curls. She was holding a
stout bottle of alcohol in one hand, and bedlinen torn firmly into stark white strips in the other.
“I’m dying for a smoke,” she said, looking straight into my eyes. “Are you coming?”
I knew I should have reasoned with her. I should have grabbed her and told her urgently that life
was short, fate was unfeeling, and that there was nothing, nothing we could have possibly done to
re-erect the crumpled standards on the trampled streets. But I stood and seized my coat from the stand,
as she held my hand in hers so tightly –
So we opened the door, and welcomed in the war.
Fin.